By Ron Arias spent 50 years as a parachute journalist, telling the world’s most dramatic stories. But some of his the best stories were those that were never told.
I’ve always felt my best stories told were the ones that for various editorial reasons never got published. They are the outtakes or stories behind the published stories – how I got them or what happened behind the scenes. I’ve spent most of my 50-year writing career chasing all manner of subjects far and wide, the last 22 years at People magazine before my retirement to Hermosa in 2007. Since then, on and off, I’ve been working on a book-length collection of such outtakes, or adventures, some quite dangerous, some humorous, all haunting me in their refusal to disappear from my mind.
I’ve given the collection the title My Life As A Pencil: Backstories from the Age Old Media. When I wrote features in the Middle East just before the start of Operation Desert Storm, the military PR officers would address us print journalists as “pencils” during briefings. The word bothered me then but now I think of such labels with pride. Also, digital journalism is so much more about speed and multi-tasking these days that I want to show how much adventure and wonder there was in the days before the Internet. By the way, my first interview at age 17 was with Ernest Hemingway in Pamplona in 1959 – and he asked most of the questions!
Ron Arias in the field.
Clean Sweep
Mid-summer and everyone was in Hamilton, Bermuda – the Times, the Post, the networks, the Star, the Enquirer, some of them with big checkbooks. We were all standing in front of the King Edward VII Hospital, awaiting updates on the New Jersey woman who survived 14 days adrift in a rubber raft. Her boyfriend had died on the tenth day, after sailing a 37-foot sailboat that sank midway between Bermuda and Long Island.
Rescued near death by a passing ship, Janet Culver was now recovering inside what looked like a medical fortress. Cops and security guards barred our access to the 48-year-old legal secretary. Since her rescue, we could only rely for news on the undramatic updates of her condition. She was improving, though still severely dehydrated and anemic. Still, we all wanted an interview, yet no one had figured out how to get to her.
The only real drama on the horizon was a hurricane. If it hit hard, we might have an even bigger story. But for the moment editors were eagerly awaiting Culver’s full story, with Hollywood in tow. My über boss at People was pushing for an exclusive, her first-person story on the cover. I’d have to get Culver to talk to me and only to me – at least initially.
Since I had successfully reported other sea-survival and disaster stories, the managing editor gave me the assignment. Death, disaster and destruction had become my specialties. It wasn’t so much that I preferred reporting on the dark side; it was because I was drawn to the plight of people living on the edge of survival — victims of war, famine, floods, shipwrecks and plane crashes. After reporting these stories for years, I knew they could be as moving and more dramatic as the tales of those struck down by heart attacks, cancer or cars. Ironically, I felt closer to life the closer I got to death. Colleagues even began calling me “D Man,” the guy who kept a flak jacket, helmet and passport in his office. I was the magazine’s first responder, ready to race to any hot spot for a feature story.
From the start, I felt oddly possessive of the Janet Culver story. I felt that if I could only interview her one-on-one, the magazine could get the story out faster and better than any other publication. If I got the chance, I’d tell Culver we would have her story on the cover in a matter of days, complete with photos and an artist’s illustrations showing the ordeal’s most dramatic moments.
I’d heard that she had hired an attorney – probably on the advice of the firm she worked for — to deal with the crush of reporters. As it happened, a lawyer of the magazine’s parent company, Time Inc., was vacationing in Bermuda when Culver was found. It was an easy matter to have a contract drawn up ready for her to sign. Still, I had to get to her soon or somebody else would seal the deal.
While reporters and TV crews were milling around outside the hospital barricades, I noticed several dark-skinned people enter a side entrance. As soon as the idea came to me, I backed away and headed for a cab. I found a store that sold clothing for domestics, hospital wear for janitors, and other kinds of uniforms. I bought a pair of institutional gray Bermuda shorts and a top to go with them. I also bought a push-broom, then dropped off my regular clothes at my hotel and headed to the hospital dressed in custodial green. Thanks to my Mexican heritage, in summer I tan fairly dark, which I thought might help me get past security.
The cab let me out a few blocks from the hospital, and I walked the rest of the way, broom in hand, trying to look as if I were going to work. At a distance I circled around the main building and approached a back door where I’d seen workers enter earlier. I knew what floor Culver was on, so after walking by two guards and then a policeman stationed by the elevator, I stepped in with several nurses. The doors closed, and I kept my eyes on the buttons of the panel in front of me. The last thing I wanted was for someone to ask me a question. I certainly hadn’t the time to master a convincing local accent. Fortunately, the nurses paid me no attention, chatting as they left at the second floor.
The doors closed and I went up to the recovery floor. I stepped out, glanced both ways, then turned left in the direction of what looked like the nurses station for the recovery rooms. I pushed the broom ahead of me. In college I had worked as a janitor, so I knew the brisk movements, keeping the side bristles at the edge to gather every speck along the baseboard. I was methodical, keeping my eyes down as I passed the counter where two or three women in white were busy with charts. So far, I remained invisible.
Further along I swept my way past doctors, nurses and technicians entering or exiting patient rooms; they walked by me without a word. Before the end of the hallway, I finally came to Janet Culver’s room. There was no guard by the door, which was open. Next to the door jamb at eye level, her name had been written in black letters on a slick white board. I pushed the broom into her room and approached the side of her bed that was free of the intravenous stand, oxygen tube hookup and vitals monitor.
She opened her eyes, looking groggy or tired or both. I held out my magazine business card for her to read. She nodded and I flipped the card over for her to see a telephone number. “Have your lawyer call me at my hotel,” I said, then pressed the card into her hand, smiled and left. I retraced my steps down the hallway to the elevator bank, still pushing the broom ahead of me. Then I went down to the first floor, out the same exit where I had entered, out to a cab and on to my hotel. About 20 minutes later, her lawyer called. “Let’s talk,” he said. In short order Janet agreed to an exclusive in exchange for her byline on the story and payment.
When the hospital later announced that she had agreed to give her story to an unnamed party, some of the other journalists went berserk. Led by the Times reporter at an impromptu news conference, they fulminated against the unknown, unethical person or persons who had done the deal. I stood next to the unsuspecting Times reporter, nodding sympathetically, since I, too, had lost stories because of deals made. I knew the feeling of losing out to someone quicker, more clever or more connected than I was. But I also knew that chasing big news — especially what promised to be an emotional romantic survival tale — is highly competitive. And I thought Culver’s story should be told as a start-to-finish adventure, giving the moment-to-moment progression of details that could propel powerful suspense and drama. Regardless of what I did to get the exclusive, I felt People could do this better than any other publication.
And we did. To help speed the process, my wife, a fast typist, flew down to transcribe my taped interviews. Culver provided me with non-stop facts about her ordeal. She was cooperative, had good recall, and spoke to me for hours at a stretch. I would hold her hand as she recounted one tense or emotional episode after another. What was most affecting were not her descriptions of thirst and hunger, of storms and capsizes, but rather the reversal of characters: on the boat, her boyfriend was the strong-willed, confident master, but once they sought refuge in the tiny raft Janet was no longer meek and obedient. In the end, she was the tough, resourceful one who persevered despite tremendous deprivations, unlike her delirious companion who swam away and drowned.
At our hotel, while my wife finished transcribing, the hurricane struck. No matter. Our little team pulled it off: the photographer got the requisite recovery-bed shot of Janet, the artist completed a half-dozen sketches based on her descriptions, and I wrote – as one editor ordered – “with utmost speed and urgency.” As I had hoped, my subject had provided me with enough material for a nine-page cover piece that begins as something of an idyllic love story:
It was a postcard perfect day when we left Bermuda on the Anaulis — blue sky, nice breeze and sun for a romantic departure. I was excited because this would be our first ocean voyage together, a chance to see if I could make such a trip without getting seasick. I also had to sort out whether or not I wanted to marry Nick, a divorced, 50-year-old “sailing bum” who was now asking me to share his new life delivering boats and sailing. I was 48, had been married twice before and was hoping this time for something lasting. This was supposed to be the big test to see if we were compatible at sea. I never imagined just how big a test it would turn out to be, something that would stretch us to the limit – and in Nick’s case, beyond…
Ron Arias reporting from Somalia. Photo courtesy Ron Arias
Relief
The cargo plane tilted into a steep dive. I was behind the pilot, strapped in next to the photographer, who sat behind the co-pilot. At what seemed like the last possible moment, the pilot leveled off the prop-driven Hercules, then swooped us upward into the sky. “Scares off the goats,” he said and began a wide turn to approach the airstrip again.
Hours earlier, Donna Ferrato and I had met for the first time at JFK just before our departure for Somalia via London, Nairobi and Mombasa. We were eager to get started on our story, though she admitted she’d never photographed starving people trapped in a war. But she was famous for her pictures of abused women and excelled at capturing emotion amid violence.
The Hercules never came to a full stop, rolling slow enough for us to hop off the rear ramp safely. The Southern Air Transport crew, mostly ex-military, shoved out palettes stacked with sacks of rice, beans, and millet. When the last palette slipped off, the engines revved up and the plane lumbered forward in an explosion of noise and dust. The pilot warned us we might be targets of thieves or warring clans, so we hustled into the heat to the small terminal, passing men running the other way to retrieve the dumped cargo. It was only about nine in the morning but the temperature had to be pushing a hundred degrees.
From the air Belet Uen resembled a welcoming oasis of trees and flat roofs spreading from the banks of a loopy, brown river. But from the ground the town struck me as a maze of bumpy dirt roads coursing between mud walls and a hodgepodge of scarred, bullet-pocked structures. On the way over to the Red Cross compound, Mary Taylor, our host and story subject, warned us: “Don’t go out by yourselves. You need protection.” Her bodyguard was a lanky young Somali dressed in sarong, dress shirt and flip-flops, his semi-automatic rifle hanging casually by a strap from his shoulder, barrel pointed down.
Mary, a public health nurse from California, was 34 and single. The Red Cross told me she’d left her hospice job in San Francisco for a six-month tour in Somalia. She’d worked in Thailand, Malawi and Iraq with war refugees and said the suffering and violence here beat anything she and the other relief workers had ever seen. “Last month I was in the office, looking out the window at some camels, when a machine gun opened fire. Then things just exploded–bazookas, grenades, bullets whistling all around us. For six hours we huddled in an inner hallway. One clan tried to steal a truck from another clan, and we got caught in the middle.”
At the compound entrance I saw more men toting weapons. As the big metal gates opened, one of the sentries shouted something to our driver and waved us forward. We pulled into a parking area and the gates swung shut behind us. More Somali shouts and quick asides into walkie-talkies. “Our warehouse is here,” Mary explained, “and they watch us.” By “they” she meant roving bands of heavily armed thugs. They roam around in improvised, old pickup trucks called “technicals”–battered contraptions armed with rocket grenade launchers and mounted, 50-cal. guns. The hooligans manning the technicals repeatedly threaten to loot relief warehouses or attack food-laden trucks returning from the airstrip. Mary said they chewed a lot of qat, the leafy stimulant that transformed them into wild-eyed, twitchy time bombs.
After a tour of the Red Cross offices to meet Somali staffers we drove several blocks away to the walled-in residence where a half-dozen Red Cross workers stay, including Mary. On the drive over, a fearsome-looking technical loaded with figures wearing headscarves and kerchiefs over their faces bounced across our intended path. Instinctively, Donna raised a camera but in seconds the Mad Max vision disappeared around a corner. Donna reminded me of other photojournalists I’d worked with, the kind who thrived on momentous reality. On the job they’re intently alert, waiting to catch a movement, an emotion, a surprising shape or image that just might convey a truthful moment. As we passed the intersection where the technicals had whizzed by, Donna glanced their way through the kicked-up dust, camera still poised to shoot.
We dropped our bags at the residence compound, then spent the afternoon following Mary on her visits to the health posts and feeding stations at the edge of town. Mary had trained a cadre of Somali assistants to run four mud-wall posts in the sprawling, brush-hut encampment where an estimated 30,000 people lived, mostly nomads who’d lost their camel and cattle herds to drought. They had walked for days to get here because they’d heard Belet Uen had feeding centers and was safer than other parts of Somalia. At our first stop, a cluster of refugees waited by the makeshift health post. Despite the midday heat, the flies and the pervasive odor of excrement, everyone waited patiently. No pushing, no shoving.
Donna absorbed the scene. As soon as we left the pickup, she shadowed Mary, with me in tow usually taking notes, trying to stay out of photo frame. This was our routine during our week with Mary. Daily we saw a serene, unflappable woman making life-or-death assessments. She would study emaciated bodies, one by one, decide who might live and who wouldn’t, who would be fed and who was beyond the benefit of food. Severely malnourished children were the most readily diagnosed; they all had the same listless, glazed-over look common just before death. Mary grimly noted the death rate of infants and small kids was the highest, sometimes more than a hundred a day.
Somehow Mary held her feelings in check. “I’m not immune to all the children dying,” she said. “But I force myself to go on. I’d be no use to anyone if I were crying all the time.” And we did the same, taking it all in as competent journalists, expecting to share our impressions with the outside world. But, as Donna said, “how crazy was it to be wandering out into a sea of thousands of starving people,” unable to share our wonderful meals with them at the end of the day.
For me, such parachute reporting in destitute, dangerous places is usually a surreal, movie-like, emotional experience. Surreal because it is so out of the ordinary; movie-like because of the drama and tension and because I know that in a few days I can walk out of the “theater” and go home, and the emotional part comes when I have to write the story. I have relive a lot of pitiful, painful moments, dwell on them for days. Writing, after all, is mostly thinking, and when the thoughts are of death and dying–as was our time in Somalia–that’s the part, to this day, where I never really leave the theater.
One afternoon, toward the end of our stay, Donna and I walked to the residential compound by ourselves. I suppose we felt we didn’t need the translator and armed escort for just a few blocks. We’d grown used to hearing sporadic gunfire at all hours, had seen many technicals rambling by but never stopping, and we’d never had a scary incident. I was actually starting to like the town–its languid pace, roosters crowing, distant, nasal calls to prayer, late afternoon breezes, intense, nightly chats over wine with relief workers from France, Germany, Switzerland.
I was feeling good because I knew I had enough material to write a moving piece about Mary and her work. Donna, who said Mary was “pure lady,” felt she had a lot of strong images to visually convey this compassionate Samaritan at survival’s edge.
So we set off along the dirt road. We knew the way. On each side of us were walls of dried mud, concrete or stucco, all topped by shards of glass or coils of barbed wire, sometimes both. We’d almost arrived within sight of the residence compound when a technical roared up from behind us. Two armed men hopped off, one with a semi-automatic rifle and the other shouldering a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. They shouted angrily, hurling words at us we didn’t understand. Unfazed, Donna quickly raised her camera and began to click off shots. She’d seen scary, threatening, hateful faces in her domestic abuse photography, so facing these narcotic-driven madmen must have seemed familiar, something she could handle.
I sensed they might shoot us on the spot. Not five feet away, the semi-automatic was pointed at Donna’s camera, while at about the same distance the tip of the rocket launcher was aimed at my head. Fingers were on the triggers of both weapons.
“Stop taking pictures,” I said. “Donna, put the camera down. These guys are serious.”
I wasn’t sure if she heard me over the man’s shouting or was too engrossed in her camera work to respond.
“Donna!” Now I was shouting. “Put the camera away before they kill us.”
Donna, cool and competent as Mary among the dying and starving, lowered her camera just as our translator came running up to intervene. After he exchanged words frantically with the young men, we turned and headed to the residence. The qat-chewing cowboys, our translator said, just wanted to know who we were and became upset at being photographed.
I never saw the photos Donna took of this incident, but I’d bet they were taken in focus and with a steady hand.
Later, we went out to the encampment. I was carrying Donna’s camera bag to free her up for picture-taking. I’d wandered off to watch a cluster of children dragging in brush and dried weeds from the surrounding desert. With this they were building shelters to sleep under. Even at a distance, I noticed signs of malnutrition–the prominent ribs and protruding, white rows of upper teeth. I stepped closer, hand in my shirt pocket, fingering a gift from a blues-playing Namibian who’d given me a Hohner harmonica the night before.
Watching the bedraggled kids approach, I pulled out my gift and began to blow–nothing coherent and no melody because I’d never learned to play. In seconds the children surrounded me, probably wondering what the noise was, who I was. They started to smile and clap, so I started clapping too, keeping the camera bag on my shoulder and the harmonica in my mouth. I did this for some minutes, then began dancing and hopping around while clapping and blowing. The kids were now giggling, laughing, still clapping at the clown in their midst.
Eventually, I noticed Donna standing off to one side. She was smiling and aiming her Leica in my direction.
Ron Arias reporting in Ecuador.
Snakes
It’s 4:40 a.m. in Managua and I’m shivering. I’m waiting in the entryway of the place where I’m staying, waiting for someone to pick me up and take me to interview the country’s young leader, Daniel Ortega. All I’m told is to be ready to run.
I’m wearing sneakers, t-shirt and shorts, and I have a small tape recorder, notebook and pen. Outside it’s dark and except for a few distant dog barks and rooster crows, very quiet.
At 5:04 a roofless military Jeep arrives to pick me up. I climb in, glad that it’s finally going to happen. After more than a week of asking for time with Ortega, I’m getting my hour with the man who’s at the moment defying Ronald Reagan and the Contras. Unfortunately, I’ll be doing the interview literally on the run.
The two armed soldiers – one beside me and the other in front — say nothing, but the driver tells me to hang on. As the Jeep moves forward, I grab a handhold at my side and focus on the dog in the headlights crossing the street. We bounce along more empty streets, through the city, and then go about five miles on a highway until we reach the rendezvous place, once a private golf resort now owned by the state.
We drive up ont one of the fairways, where the young driver tells me to hop out. Now that the sky has brightened, I can see the serious faces of the soldiers. “Get ready,” one of them says. “Here he comes.”
I nod and jump down. I’m not cold anymore.
Just then another Jeep appears alongside us, and I see Harry, the photographer on assignment with me, sitting in the back. We trade good mornings and then suddenly Ortega jogs into view. He’s accompanied by seven big men in running sweats, all carrying Kalishnikovs. Next to these guys, the comandante, who’s wearing a shirt and shorts, looks small. He hurriedly shakes my hand, barely slowing his stride. “Let’s go,” he tells me in Spanish.
As we trot up an inclined fairway, behind the Jeep with Harry in the back, I ask him how often he jogs. I’m holding up the tape recorder so that it’s only a few feet from his face. The soldiers have moved to the sides or dropped back in order to be out of Harry’s photos.
“Whenever I can,” he says. “Sometimes every day. . . .”
“How far?”
“About four or five miles,” he answers. “You too, I see.” He seems pleased I can handle the pace.
“I try.”
I’m about to ask another question when Harry, who’s hunkered down facing us in the rear of the Jeep, starts yelling at me. He’s looking into one of his cameras and telling me to get out of his picture, to move away. He’s a cantankerous Scotsman and he’s cussing up a storm. We need pictures, so I veer to the right and into the weedy, tall grass, trying my best to keep up and not trip.
“Get out of there!” Ortega shouts, waving his arm for me to leave the rough. “Poisonous snakes!” All this is in Spanish, which Harry doesn’t understand.
I move out of the weeds and run back to Ortega. But before I can ask another question, Harry’s hollering at me again. So I return to the rough, thinking he’ll snap a few more shots and then I’ll be able to resume the questions.
But Ortega shouts at me again, warning of snakes. I run back onto the fairway, trying my best to stay out of Harry’s picture-taking.
Ortega waves me in closer. “Go ahead, ask questions,” he says, maybe enjoying the little tug of war with Harry.
Over the next hour or so we run up and down at least fifteen fairways. I’m near exhaustion, though still asking questions in breathless spurts. I see Ortega’s tiring too because his answers are getting shorter.
Before the end, I’ve had it with Harry. I tell him where he can stick his camera, and I stay close to Ortega, squeezing in as many questions as I can.
When we stop running, we’re both soaked. So are the men with the Kalishnikovs. But once we all catch our breath, we’re all smiles, relaxed and not so stiff and military.
Harry’s come up with another photo possibility: Ortega with a Mets baseball cap and tee-shirt, which we’d brought with us from New York.
Ortega’s a major league baseball fan. He immediately sheds his wet shirt and slips on the new one. Then he puts on the cap.
Harry asks if he can take photos of him seated cross-legged in the rough, head and shoulders above the weeds.
“Very well,” Ortega says and eagerly moves to where Harry indicates. I look at the soldiers. They’re amused and a few are chuckling and making attaboy comments. No one seems to be worried about the snakes.
From “My Life As A Pencil: Backstories From The Age Of Old Media.” Ron Arias will read from his work at Beach magazine’s Live at the Lounge event, Nov. 17, doors open at 5:30, readings at 6:30. Free. 1018 Hermosa Ave. Hermosa Beach.
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